ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN LATE OCTOBER, I was at work when Kenzie swung open the tinkling glass door of the Europa Deli and looked around with contempt.
“Hi, I’d like some large wieners,” she said loudly, ringing the service bell so that Alice looked up from the egg salad she was mixing to glare at her. Alice and Maria had learned to tolerate Kenzie’s occasional visits, even though they made no secret of their disapproval of her.
“Free sample?” I held up a plate lined with slices of cured meat and she waved me away, gagging theatrically.
“How do you stand it here?” she demanded. “Not only do they force you to stick your hands in, like, mayonnaise all day, it smells in here.” She looked up at the fat brown links of sausage coiled from the ceiling and wrinkled her nose.
“Yeah,” I said, popping a bite-size piece of sausage into my mouth, “but the free knockwurst makes it all worth it!”
“Don’t make me vomit.” Kenzie squatted down to get a better look at the trays of salads and meats behind the counter. “Hey, what is that? Blood?”
“It’s borscht. Beet soup.”
“Sick.”
I had tasted it earlier that morning and liked it, but I certainly wasn’t going to admit that now. Seeing it through Kenzie’s eyes, it did look like blood, and it bobbed with bald-peeled vegetables like dead white fingers. She held out her phone and took a picture of the tub of borscht. Later, during my lunch break, when I was sitting in the storeroom eating a ham and potato salad sandwich, I would see Kenzie’s picture on my Instagram feed with the caption:
Beet soup or murder scene? #EuropaDeli #nasty #worstjobever
“If I worked here,” she announced, strumming her French-manicured nails on the glass counter, “I’d kill myself.”
Kenzie’s tendency for hyperbole aside, she did have a point: working at Europa Deli isn’t exactly a teenager’s dream job. Sure, mixing drinks at the smoothie bar at the Harlem Irving Plaza would be a lot more fun, but Maria and Alice pay me twelve bucks an hour and I can’t afford to waste my time working somewhere else for minimum wage. I’m trying to save up for college. Some months, I’m even just trying to help pay for groceries.
See, after my dad went to jail, at the end of my first semester freshman year, my homeroom teacher, Sister Pauline, handed around everybody’s report cards, and girls started excitedly comparing grades and GPAs. But all I got was a note ordering me to go downstairs and see Sister Dorothy immediately. I sat across from her desk in the principal’s office, beneath the mournful eyes of an enormous framed painting of Jesus, his Sacred Heart bursting from his chest surrounded by jagged rays of light, while she told me in her gentle voice that the school couldn’t release my semester grades.
“Why not?” I demanded.
“That’s a conversation you’ll need to have with your mother,” the old nun said.
I confronted my mom as soon as I got home from school, while she was in her bedroom, packing her suitcase to go visit my dad in Nebraska. She admitted that our tuition check had bounced and, even worse, that we’d spent all of our money, including every dime of my college savings, on my dad’s legal fees. In order for me to continue at ASH, my mom had to swallow her pride and borrow money from my aunt Kathy to cover the payment. Although she’s never said anything to me about it, I have a feeling my crazy aunt has been paying my tuition ever since.
The following month, the bank foreclosed on our house. After my royal ass beating on the way home from David Schmidt’s party, my anger toward my father had mutated into a simmering rage, and now, with this latest setback, it solidified into full-blown hatred. Watching my mom deal with the loss of our house wasn’t exactly a party, either. She dropped thirty pounds. Her hair started falling out in clumps. Every time she took a shower I could hear her trying to muffle her sobs under the hiss of the water. The doctor put her on antidepressants, which as far as I could tell didn’t actually make her feel better so much as make her feel nothing at all. I think there was a good six months that went by where she didn’t smile, or cry, or laugh, or sing. It was like living with a dead person. And still, every other month, like a loyal lapdog, she made the long, lonely drive across the Great Plains to visit the man who had destroyed her life. Worst of all, she always tried to talk me into going with her and couldn’t understand why I kept refusing.
By this time, Stevie Junior was already floating around on some aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean. It was just me and the emaciated zombie who vaguely resembled my mom. For a couple months we set up camp in my uncle Jimbo and aunt Col’s drafty, half-finished basement. My mom slept on the couch and I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor. But eventually we found the cat-piss-smelling apartment where we still live today, and even though most of my mom’s hair has grown back, she’s still on the antidepressants, and sleeping pills, and something for anxiety, too. She works so much, mostly at night, that sometimes a whole week will go by and I won’t even see her. And even with all that overtime, we’re still broke.
When I first started at the deli, I found myself surrounded by a bunch of middle-aged ladies who were always clucking at me in a rapid-fire mix of Polish and English. According to them, I didn’t wipe down the cutting board properly after cutting up chicken. I overstuffed the nalesniki. I put too much vinegar in the red cabbage salad. I was four generations removed from my Eastern European ancestors, which made me, in their eyes, hopeless.
I was all set to quit, but one paycheck gradually became two, and then a month had gone by and then a season. Eventually, either because they felt sorry for me or because I started complying with food code when dealing with raw poultry, the ladies’ criticism softened into affectionate sniping. Soon they began to treat me like a beloved (if not very intelligent) family pet. I grew to sort of enjoy the quiet walks to the deli as the sun rose pink over the bungalows of my sleeping neighborhood, the nosy questions the ladies asked me about boys and school, the lunch breaks where I’d sit in the cool, quiet storeroom on an overturned packing crate and eat a piece of fresh-baked bread smeared with butter and homemade plum jam. Two years later, I still work every Saturday and Sunday morning shift, more in the summers and on holiday breaks. And even though over the course of those two years I’ve only been able to save enough for about two weeks of college tuition, not including room and board, I still feel like I’m contributing in some way to our decimated family. I guess in life you have to look on the bright side, right? I mean, yeah, we’ve lost everything and my brother’s on a ship on the other side of the planet and my mom’s depressed and my dad’s a criminal and sometimes I have to hear the horrifying sounds of Sonny’s porno channels drifting up into my bedroom, but I have $2,496.54 in my savings account and I can whip up the best batch of pork meatballs in dill sauce you’ve ever tasted.
That’s not nothing, right?
“Hey,” Kenzie said. She was standing on the other side of the counter from me, snapping her long fingers in my face. “Are you alive in there?”
“Uh, yeah.” I shook away my thoughts, leaning down to adjust a spoon in the horseradish beets while I waited for the heat to burn away from my face. “Sorry.”
“Whatever. What are you doing when you get off?”
I shrugged. “No plans.”
“Do you have Red Rocket with you?”
I pointed outside at the candy-red Ford Taurus, laced along the bottom with a fine sifting of rust.
“Cool. You want to take me to get a tattoo?”
“You say this,” I laughed, “like it’s a typical Saturday afternoon errand. Oh, I’m just gonna pick up my dry cleaning, go to the post office, and pay some guy to draw a picture on my skin that will remain there until the day I die.”
“It is a typical errand for me,” she said. “Over fifty percent of Americans have tattoos, Wendy. You and my grandma are the only people left on earth who still think they’re a big deal.”
“I don’t think they’re a big deal,” I protested. “I just think—”
“Look, can you take me or not?”
With Kenzie, if you want to have any hope of being allowed to finish your sentences, you better talk fast.
“Fine. I’ll pick you up at four.”
“So, what’s it gonna be this time?” We were stuck in Saturday afternoon traffic on our way to see Jayden, Kenzie’s tattoo guy.
She pulled out her phone and held a picture up in front of my face while I tried to navigate into the left turn lane. It was a round pink heart, and inside, in bubble letters, it said I LUV BOYS.
“Isn’t that amazing?”
“I LUV BOYS? Seriously?”
“What?”
“I mean, aside from the misspelling, don’t you think that’s a little general? There are, like, three point five billion boys in the world. I’m pretty sure you don’t ‘luv’ all of them.”
“You’re completely missing the point,” she sighed, propping her booted feet up on my dashboard. “It’s supposed to be ironic.”
“But how is it ironic?”
“Because it’s funny!”
“But funny isn’t the same thing as ironic,” I ventured.
“It’s ironic, then, because I’m totally boy crazy. And it’s funny.”
“But it would only be ironic if you didn’t like boys. Like, if you were a lesbian, then it might be ironic.”
“Ew!” She reached over and smacked my shoulder. “I’m not a fucking lesbo, okay? I love boys! That’s the point!”
“How about those boys?” I pointed to a pair of pale, skinny kids with wispy mustaches, glasses, and Star Wars T-shirts, in line outside the Portage Theater for a sci-fi film festival. “Those are boys. Are they included?”
“Those boys are repulsive losers,” she snapped, “and you know it. You’re just being a bitch, and trying to act like you understand irony more than I do just because you’re in honors fucking English.”
“Evan Munro pops his own pimples in public and wipes the pus on other people’s wallpaper!” The outburst exploded from me before I could stop it, like a wayward belch. In the shocked silence that followed, I braced myself for the withering wrath of Kenzie Quintana, for the guillotine to come down, for my official banishment from the cool group and the commencement of my life as a lonely loser.
Instead, she began laughing hysterically.
“I know,” she gasped. “He is so disgusting. But his abs are insane and he’s amazing at football.” She flipped down the sun visor and examined her lipstick in the mirror. Pleased with what she saw, she snapped the visor back into place. “You’re hilarious, Wendy,” she said, shaking her head. “For a minute there I thought you were actually pissed.”
Jayden’s “studio” turned out to be nothing more than a corner of his mother’s garage. It smelled like spilled paint and stale weed, and the ceiling was strung with red and green Christmas lights. On one end of the garage stood a sagging velveteen couch where his cousin, who he introduced to us as Tino, sat slumped beneath a Sox hat, sipping an energy drink and glowering into a paperback novel. On the other end was an old pleather office chair next to a workman’s bench lined with little jars of colored dyes and needles in plastic wrapping. The walls were covered with construction tools hanging from nails and faded classic movie posters: Taxi Driver, Scarface, Boyz n the Hood, and Goodfellas—which was, I remembered with a painful twinge, my dad’s all-time favorite movie.
While Jayden directed Kenzie to a folding chair for her “consultation,” I went and sat opposite Tino on the velveteen couch. He glanced up at me before returning to his book. I tried to catch a glimpse at the cover—it was so rare to see somebody reading an actual book instead of staring into a phone—but he had it folded over so I couldn’t see what it was.
On the other side of the room, Kenzie was showing Jayden the picture of the tattoo she wanted.
“I LUV BOYS?” Jayden handed the phone back to her. “Seriously?”
Kenzie sighed loudly. “Is everybody fucking stupid today? I just had to explain why it’s ironic to Wendy in the car, and I don’t feel like doing it again, okay?”
“But why is it ironic?” Tino had put his book down and was looking at Kenzie. I saw the title: The Collected Stories of Anton Chekhov. “Are you a lesbian?”
“No, I am not a lesbian, dumbass,” she snapped. “Do I look like a lesbian to you?”
“Sexual orientation isn’t, like, a skin color. You can’t know just by looking at someone whether they’re gay or not.”
“Yeah, well, girls who look like me?” She flicked her hair and posed for him. “Not lesbians, okay?”
Tino shrugged, half smiling. “Okay.”
I was sort of astounded. He was maybe the first boy I’d ever seen who didn’t turn into a pile of mush in Kenzie’s presence. He seemed sort of amused by her more than anything else.
“Okay,” Jayden said. “So where are we putting this ironic tattoo anyway?” Kenzie lifted up her shirt, showing off the narrow plank of her perfect abdomen, accented with a twinkling teardrop-shaped belly-button piercing.
“Here.” She pointed to the small hollow beneath her rib cage.
“The definition of irony is when what you say and what you mean are completely opposite,” said Tino, stretching out on the couch. “So you could describe the tattoo as campy, maybe. But it’s not ironic.”
Kenzie stared at him for a long time.
“Yeah, well, the definition of ghetto is you,” she finally declared.
“Good one.”
I stared down at my phone, fighting the sudden urge to laugh while Kenzie huffed over to the old office chair. She took off her leather jacket, draped it over the chair, and pulled her shirt over her head, lying back so that when she breathed, the two swells beneath her blue lace bra heaved up and down. After Jayden finished tracing the image onto her stomach, the needle buzzed to life. He leaned over and began boring into her skin with it, and I had to look away, unzipping my backpack and pulling out my homework.
“What are you reading?”
Tino had closed his book and was looking over at me expectantly. He was dressed in a fleece hoodie and track pants, and had sleepy brown eyes and skin the color of sun-warmed clay. His teeth were sort of crooked, but not in a bad way. He was, all in all, sort of disarmingly cute.
“Oh,” I said, “just a book for my English class.”
“What book?”
“Othello.”
“Nice.” He nodded approvingly.
“Boring,” I said. “Have you read it?”
“‘It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul!’” He sat up dramatically on the couch. “‘Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars, it is the cause.’” He flopped back down, stretched one leg across the other and grinned at me. “Act five, scene two. You look surprised.”
“A little,” I laughed.
“Not so ghetto after all, am I?” He stood up, then, and lifted up his sweatshirt. Tattooed across one smooth pectoral muscle was Michael Jordan’s face. On the other was William Shakespeare’s.
“Wow,” I said. “I guess you’re a fan.”
“Basketball and literature are my passions. Hey, have you read any of the history plays?”
“The history plays?”
“Yeah. Henry the Fifth. Henry the Fourth. Richard the Third. The history plays.”
“No. Where’d you learn so much about Shakespeare, anyway?”
“I read some of his plays in school—I go to Lincoln. You know, that scary public school that all you ASH girls are freaking out about having to go to next year. But I read the rest on my own. I’m something of an autodidact.”
I knew he was using that word to impress me, or to make me feel stupid for not knowing what it meant. I decided he was arrogant and that it was best to ignore him, although the image of his broad, tattooed chest was going to prove sort of difficult to stop thinking about. I purposefully turned to a new page and furrowed my brow in an attempt to look like I was engrossed in my Shakespeare. After a while, he got the hint. He picked up The Collected Stories of Anton Chekhov and turned to the page where he’d left off.
“Hey, Wendy,” Kenzie demanded from the other side of the room above the dull buzzing sound of the needle, “Jayden doesn’t believe me. About your dad. Is he, or is he not Stephen Boychuck, aka Chicago’s most notorious police officer, aka the guy who shoved guns up people’s asses and Tasered people’s balls, aka the guy who’s in jail for, like, fifteen years?”
I felt the blood rush to my face, remembering the moment when my arms were twisted behind my back, my scapular was ripped off my neck, and a girl whose father couldn’t walk or talk said Gut him like the pig he is.
“Well?”
“He’s Stephen Boychuck. Yeah.”
“See?” She hit Jayden playfully on the arm. “I told you. You owe me five bucks.”
I opened Othello, which had fallen closed in my lap, and paged absently, pretending to concentrate, but really just reading the same underlined line over and over again:
Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.
“Hey.” Tino’s voice was gentle. He’d moved down the couch and was sitting next to me. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” I didn’t look up.
“Why are you friends with that girl? She’s awful.”
“No, she’s not.”
“She just humiliated you.”
“Yeah, well, she didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”
“But that’s so shitty!”
“And you’re making it worse!” I moved away from him. “I don’t even know you. Just drop it, okay?”
“Sorry.” He was quiet for a minute, while we both listened to the buzzing of the needle. “But seriously. I’m asking. Why are you friends with her? You don’t seem evil. So what do you two have in common?”
I sighed, and tented my book on my lap. “Even if I wanted to explain it to you, you probably wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
“Maybe some other time.”
“Wendy!” Kenzie’s voice, queenly and demanding, beckoned from the other side of the garage. “Come check it out!”
Dutifully, I put away my homework and went over to the chair, where Jayden was wiping the fresh tattoo with a soapy cloth. Kenzie’s skin beneath the pink and blue ink was flaming and red, like someone had held an iron to it.
“Well?” she said. “What do you think?”
“It’s exactly like the picture,” I said, which was neutral without being a compliment.
She held her phone above her bare belly and began snapping pictures. When she was satisfied, she handed Jayden a wad of cash, then leaned up and kissed him on the cheek.
“You’re a master, Jay. I love it.”
“Do you L-O-V-E it or do you L-U-V it?” Tino asked.
“Shut up, weirdo.” She turned to me. “Let’s go.”
It was only late afternoon but already getting dark as we walked to the car. The leaves were still hanging on to the trees, and the small saplings planted along the parkway of Fullerton Avenue were a spindly riot of reds and oranges. They made the whole street look festive, despite its dreary façade of brick strip malls and auto body shops lined with stolen tires. A cold threat hung in the air, whispering at the long Chicago winter ahead.
“What’s the story with that Tino loser?” Kenzie said when we got in the car. “I saw him pulling up his shirt like he thinks he’s got a hot body or something.”
“He was showing me his tattoos,” I said. “He’s got one of Michael Jordan and one of William Shakespeare.”
“William Shakespeare, like that old-ass writer?”
“No, Kenz. William Shakespeare, the starting point guard on the Chicago Bulls.”
“There’s a William Shakespeare on the Bulls?”
“No. I was just— Never mind.”
While Kenzie proceeded to call Emily and Sapphire and babble on and on about her latest ink, I drove back to our neighborhood slowly, absently, thinking about Tino’s question and the conscious choices I’d made after David Schmidt’s graduation party that had led me to where I was today: totally popular and totally miserable.